Anyone who has served on a jury or tried a case knows that the American jury system is pretty stupid. Don’t get us wrong — it is absolutely without a doubt a sacred institution designed to ensure justice better than any other system we know of — but it’s still...
Back in the infancy of this blog, we wrote a piece called “No More Google Mistrials: A proposal for courts to adapt to modern life.” In it, we lamented that our jurisprudence hadn’t caught up with the realities of the internet age, and that mistrials were still being called whenever...
In more than a dozen years of conducting and observing felony jury trials, at both the state and federal level, we’ve seen enough jury nullification to know it’s a real phenomenon, and not merely anecdotal. We’ve seen jurors refuse to convict the most obviously guilty defendant, because they felt sorry...
“Google mistrials” are in the news again. Every few years, we hear about mistrials being declared because jurors were caught researching the facts online. It’s not a new phenomenon — there have always been jurors who felt the urge to find out for themselves what really happened — all that’s...
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